10

Thursday, June 18, 2015
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
SPORTS

They stayed outside because they 

were not given access to the com-
fort of indoor locker rooms or any of 
the amenities the football team was 
pampered with.

“We were just talking about this 

at dinner,” Szady said in Oklahoma. 
“Liz (Eagan) pulled out a picture of 
us at halftime of a field hockey game, 
and we were playing at Michigan 
Stadium. We’re all just sitting on 
the ground, eating cut-up oranges 
that we had brought. The coach was 
standing up, leaning over and talk-
ing to us as we were sprawled out on 
the sideline. Vastly different.”

In 2015, change is evident. The 

field hockey team doesn’t linger on 
the sidelines of an empty Big House; 
it plays at the newly renovated Phyl-
lis Ocker Field — a 1,500-seat home 
of its own.

After the 2013 construction 

of the field hockey-specific sta-
dium, Team 40 owned the turf, 
but Team One returned. Thirteen 
of the original 15 members from 
the inaugural field hockey team 
came back to Ann Arbor, and their 
tour of the new facilities left them 
amazed.

“We were going through the train-

ing rooms and they’ve got the ice bath 
and the hot tubs,” Eagan said.

“We said we could stay over night 

here in this building!” Szady added.

“And someone launders the uni-

forms,” Eagan added, as the two 
bounced back-and-forth off each 
other’s memories. “They have plac-
es to put their shoes to dry. And 
they’ve got shoes! We had to buy our 
own stuff.”

“They’ve got locker rooms!” 

Szady 
responded. 
“We 
didn’t 

have locker rooms. We didn’t 

have shoes. When we played field 
hockey, we played for a two-month 
season, where these kids are doing 
it all year round, and they’re on 
scholarships. We didn’t have schol-
arships. We only had one coach, 
I don’t think we had manager or 
anything like that.”

Baths, laundry, locker rooms 

and shoes. Guaranteed provisions 
to modern Division I athletes, but 
five-star accommodations to field 
hockey players in the 1970s. Get-
ting from point A to point B took 40 
years; it was a slow progression, but 
a successful evolution nonetheless. 
The resources available to Michi-
gan’s field hockey players today 
match the best in the world.

The team started with practi-

cally no resources. Now they have 
them, and they are consequentially 
successful. Piecing together the 
puzzle from the last 40 years of the 
sport is complex. The team wasn’t 
immediately prominent on a nation-
al level, but four decades changed 
everything.

After eight regular season con-

ference championships, five Big 
Ten Tournament championships, 
three trips to the Final Four and 
one national title, it’s safe to say that 
the Michigan field hockey team has 
caught up.

***

Field hockey wasn’t her only 

sport, but Sheryl Szady’s time on 
the court revives similar memories.

Forty-six years after its open-

ing, the Crisler Center underwent 
massive renovations prior to the 
2012-2013 basketball season. A 
few months later, the University 
rededicated the arena and invited 
back many former athletes for 
the ceremony, Szady being one of 

them.

Part of the rededication, which 

was held during a men’s basketball 
game against Penn State, consisted 
of a montage of pictures and vid-
eos throughout the decades since 
Crisler’s opening. But when the 
committee organizing the event 
reached out to Szady requesting 
photos of her playing basketball, her 
answer was blunt.

“No. There was no media,” Szady 

said. “There were some pictures 
from when we were playing Michi-
gan State, and I might be in one of 
those pictures, from their media, 
but we had no coverage.”

The first handful of women’s 

basketball games were never adver-
tised in The Ann Arbor News or 
The Michigan Daily. There weren’t 
thousands of fans flocking down 
into the lower bowl when Szady and 
her teammates entered through the 
north tunnel. No photographers or 
reporters huddled into the press 
boxes and conference rooms after 
games.

There were maybe 15 people 

watching.

At that time, the only person 

that covered Michigan women’s 
sports was Szady’s college room-
mate, Leslie Riester, who joined 
the Daily because nobody would 
write about women’s teams other-
wise. When Riester wrote a feature 
on the deplorable conditions under 
which the women’s basketball team 
played, it made the front page, one 
of the first mentions of the team in 
the public media.

Though, the first time that any 

women’s varsity competition was 
mentioned in the Daily, the field 
hockey team was given a single sen-
tence, written by Riester.

“Michigan’s women’s field hock-

ey team bowed to Western Michi-
gan last night in Kalamazoo, 2-0. 
Michigan’s coach was proud with 
her team’s performance due to the 
superlative competition.”

A quoteless, imageless, one-by-

two inch description was all the 
Wolverines had to show for their 
inaugural Michigan Daily recap, 
and Riester wasn’t even given a 
byline. Few were interested in 
reading 
about 

women’s sports, 
and even fewer 
were 
deter-

mined to write 
about them.

But 
since 

Title IX origi-
nated, women’s 
sports, 
espe-

cially 
at 
the 

college 
level, 

have 
progres-

sively climbed toward the pedestal 
of fandom and media appreciation 
the men embrace. Discussing the 
opportunities available to female 
athletes in comparison to males 
begins to feel irrelevant, almost 
obsolete, because of the manner 
by which women’s sports are now 
received. In Oklahoma City, this 
trend was evident.

The 
2015 
Women’s 
College 

World Series didn’t attempt to make 
a statement about gender equality, 
but it did show how far women’s 
sports have come in the public eye. 
It was treated, celebrated and expe-
rienced like any other — men’s or 
women’s.

The World Series wasn’t about 

gender. It was about athletes. And 
first team All-Americans. It was 
about Michigan. Florida. Two of the 

best softball players in history duel-
ing on the game’s biggest stage.

A 
passerby 
never 
could’ve 

noticed women’s sports once trailed 
behind.

Szady and Eagan remember that 

time — when men overshadowed 
in all realms. That has passed. 
It’s measurable in some aspects, 
immeasurable in other, but if 
women’s sports haven’t yet caught 
up, the gap becomes narrower 

every day.

Earlier 
this 

month, 
78,078 

fans from around 
the world cara-
vanned 
to 
the 

Sooner State to 
witness the great-
est softball play-
ers in the world. 
It was a tourna-
ment of power-
houses, built by 

fundamentally flawless lineups.

These renowned athletes don’t 

live for a time when any person 
could walk into a barren Michigan 
Stadium to find the field hockey 
team sitting on the ground eating 
orange slices. They work for a time 
when reserving a season ticket 
becomes a necessity, when a cher-
ished chair-back seat becomes an 
expensive treasure.

Perhaps in the next few years, 

Erik Bakich will lead a flourishing 
Michigan baseball team to the Col-
lege World Series. If softball stum-
bles, maybe then, Carol Hutchins 
will flip the script.

“We’ve got to catch Bakich,” she 

might say.

But “catching up” won’t be about 

evening the playing field. It will be 
about succeeding on it.

DELANEY RYAN/Daily

Sheryl Szady was a member of Michigan’s first varsity field hockey and women’s basketball teams in 1973 with minimal funds.

“We didn’t have 

locker rooms. 
We didn’t have 

shoes.”

CATCHING
From Page 9

PHOTO COURTESY OF SHERYL SZADY

The Michigan Daily’s first-ever article on a woman’s varsity sport. All 27 words of it.

